Shanmugasundaram Venkataraman (Venkat)

Biography

After spending my undergraduate and postgraduate years learning biochemistry in the field of chromatin, leading to a PhD, I switched to other major interests in biology for my early career - developmental biology and biomedical imaging. I joined the eMouseAtlas Project (formerly the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project, a open source, open access project) at a time when bioinformatics and the use of computers in labs was still very limited and this gave me an oppotunity to explore many new avenues. I was primarily involved in imaging of mouse embryos and curation of image data into spatial atlases created by eMouseAtlas. This involved many novel techniques and the use of bespoke software as well as commercial methods. In terms of research data management practises, we created our own pipelines and infrastructure, in large part due to a lack of outside guidance and funder requirements, and since we were generating and handling large amounts of data, this was essential. However, our RDM practices were mostly in line with current RDM good practice guidelines.